The budget has hit wine merchants and drinkers quite hard.

After drinking over 1,000 Riojas in a year while researching a book, John Radford explains how Spain's best-known red wine continues to reinvent itself with such success

The author salutes the 1847 vintage of the legendary sweet wine from the Gironde, Château d’Yquem, a bottle of which recently became the most expensive wine ever sold in the United States and is now the most expensive white wine in the world

As part of a six-month tour of the main wine-producing countries of the world, the author stopped long enough in South Africa to discover the hidden treasures of Hamilton Russell
I’m just back from the United States where the local wine is ridiculously expensive, apart from the ridiculously cheap, and you wouldn’t want to drink an awful lot of that, since Diet Coke may be more subtle.
This month we feature luxurious wines from France — some well-known, others which deserve to become much better known.
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Time for our annual offer of Château Musar from the excellent folk at Wheeler Cellars, sister company to Lay & Wheeler.
I love Stone, Vine & Sun of Winchester. They keep winning awards for best independent wine merchant; they have a knack for finding delicious wines at excellent prices from places you haven’t heard about yet but very soon will.
This is our positively final offer for Christmas, and it’s terrific. Thanks to Lay & Wheeler we have half a dozen French classics, all of which would be very welcome on the Yuletide dinner table, or at a memorable party. What’s more, every one is generously discounted. They are not cheap wines, but they are tremendous value.
I cannot imagine anyone who looks less like Father Christmas than Adam Brett-Smith, the managing director of Corney & Barrow. Adam is slender instead of fat, his face clean-shaven rather than covered in a fluffy white beard, and he would no more wear a red fur-lined suit and a silly hat than you or I would go to work dressed as Ronald McDonald.
A visit to Averys of Bristol is always a delight. They are one of our oldest wine merchants, and while most of the stock is kept these days in a modern warehouse out of town, they still have a cellar in central Bristol.
Southwold has just been voted the finest seaside resort in Britain, and it’s easy to see why.
Spectator readers are famous for being richer than most, which is why the magazine carries ads for cashmere hip flasks and handbags made from the toenails of hand-reared angora rabbits.
Fortnum & Mason has its own range of wines, and as you would expect, they are very good indeed.
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